In the usual course of doing business, service providers, particularly travel service providers, frequently add numerous and varied fees and surcharges to the basic cost of a service. In some cases the total of the extra fees may approach or even surpass the cost of the base services. Therefore, it is important for customers of such service provider to track those fees. Moreover, fees among different providers are not always comparable, and many service providers purposely do not list or otherwise bring to light those fees, because hiding the fees and surcharges allows them to protect some high margin revenues.
What is clearly needed is a system and method for breaking out and estimating the various fees and surcharges charged by each service provider to an organization or to individuals in general that uses the services of competing providers, rather than listing just a basic negotiated service fee, thus allowing a true comparison of the overall cost of the purchased services.